Saturday, May 22, 2010

Moving on to With Musket and Tomahawk by Louusz

This is an amazing book that reads as well as any Mitchner work. I recommend this for Summer reading or as fare for students of the Revolutionary War. We do not think of New York State in terms of rugged Wilderness. However, even today this region is somewhat wild in many areas. If you have not lived or traveled in the area it is made somewhat easier by roads. The rugged woods that were a part of the Battle remain.

I have driven in and around this region many times. Its rugged beauty persists till the current era.One does not need to go to Maine to see the primeval woods. It is much closer in Adirondak Park.

Onto an amazing part of the book. This area should have been fairly well known to the military in the UK. Many Battles were fought in the Ticonderoga and William Henry area. Armies had to contend with these obstacles in the French and Indian War.

Saratoga marks the last major campaign in the Northern region. There were plenty of raids, but the focus was elsewhere.

2 comments:

CM said...

Mr. Beakerkin,

You are an avid reader, I'm still leafing through my treasure of a find in an old book store called "Changes in the Land," and of course "1491". But I have Grandkids that want to be at Grandma's house ALL the time, now its SCHOOL OUT, OH NO! Today we really are wild Indians going in and out the wide open door which is propt open.

In this book Henry David Thoreau discribes an English traveler William Wood's recounter of 1633 of the landscape, this was two centuries earlier. It must have been like Heaven to the Euros who encountered the land and were running away from oppression.....

If the area is as beautiful and lush and wild as you describe, just think how beautiful it must have been in the 1600. "On the area where Indian settlement had been greatest, the woods had presented a more open and parklike appearance to the first English settlers without the underbrush and coppice growth so common in the nineteenth-century Concord."

Did the Indians have a fairy God Mother who came and cleaned the underbrush? No.....they instinctively knew how take care of the land, but the Euros could only say it was abandoned.

I can drive to our little Wichita Mt. range in ten minutes and try to remember it was once lush with Bears and Mt. lions, deer, beavers and such, but am just thankful that someone(Theodore Roosevelt)a member of Government of all things had the wherewithall to set aside these beautiful lands for our viewing and safe camping pleasure.

What would America be if we didn't have these Federal Parks set aside? Then there are those that want to do away with the Federal Government! Like these hillbillies in Oklahoma(Brogden/yeagley included). They include, I'm sure the Indians...they don't need our vote. Yeagley(non-Indian) honors him!

beakerkin said...

I have had the pleasure of traversing the area described in the readings recently. We do not think of the area as a deep woods, but it is.

The Eastern forests are very lush and in some places visibility is nill. When we think of swamps most of us think of Florida, but there are plenty in Northern NY and NE.